Harry G. Lang’s inspiring A Phone of Our Own: The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell relates how deaf people finally gained access to the technology of telephone communication nearly a century after its invention. Long after heaing people took the telephone for granted, notes Lang (a professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf), “it was very common for deaf people to use letters and postcards or to drive long distances for face-to-face communication.” But in the mid-1960s, three men—James C. Marsters, Robert H. Weitbrecht and Andrew Saks—joined efforts to give the deaf community a viable, accessible technology: the teletypewriter, or TTY. Tracing their efforts, Lang recounts TTY’s technological and political history.

Harry G. Lang is a former professor in the Department of Research at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Rochester, NY.